The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Digital Video Recording systems (“DVRs”) and other similar media devices enable users to consume a wide variety of media and have revolutionized the way users watch and record multimedia content. In general, user interface systems found in DVRs and other media devices communicate with a display screen and display an interactive interface on a display device. Users typically interact with such user interface systems using remote controls and other physical input devices. A drawback of these physical input devices is that it is often cumbersome for a user to express commands and queries to find and interact with multimedia content available to the user. For example, if a user desires to search for movies that contain the user's favorite actor, the user may be required to manually key in, using a remote control or similar device, the actor's name and other elements of a relevant search command.
In some systems, voice input is used to operate various user devices. However, traditional voice-based input systems are generally unaware of the context of individual user's voice requests and/or what particular commands each user may use to express a desired device action or search for multimedia content. Consequently, voice-based input systems often fail to accurately recognize users' voice commands resulting in non-performance of requested device actions and/or the retrieval of multimedia content search results that are irrelevant to users' intended queries.